Over the years, I have mentored quite a few System Administrators. Levelling up means learning about your tools and what they’re capable of (and not memorizing command line flags). For this year’s article on SysAdvent, I wanted to share a lot about one my favorite tools: yum. When I say yum, I mean a little more than just the yum cli itself, but the ecosystem of tooling around it. I spend a lot of time doing things like package building, package repository management, and all in all hacking around with rpms and yum.

Yum is a tool that you’ve probably used if you been a system administrator for any period of time. It’s also one of those tools that is very easy to use and have it get out of your way. yum does network-based dependency resolution, meaning that if you want to install a package, it will download and install all dependencies of that package as well. These are the basics people often know. Under the hood it uses rpm. In normal operation, you use yum for searching, installation and uninstallation of packages. That’s actually pretty awesome, but mainly the trivial use-case for yum.

Beyond that, however, there is much more to the way yum works and interacts with repository metadata. Sometimes being able to query that data can solve heinous problems easily, rather than coming up with odd workarounds. That information can also help you make good decisions about package management.

Natron is a free and open source video compositing software, similar in functionality to Adobe After Effects or Nuke by The Foundry.

The project is a free (Mozillla Public License v2) node-based compositor that relies on OpenColorIO for color management, OpenImageIO for file formats support, and Qt for user interface. It also works with 32bit float per channel precision and supports OFX plugins, both free and commercial.

Natron was started last year at Inria, a public science and technology institution that unites several research centres in France. Alexandre Gauthier, the lead developer of Natron, got the required funding from the institution, and last December he additionally won a “Boost Your Code” contest at Inria that offered him 12 months of paid development. In May this year, Alexandre presented the project at Libre Graphics Meeting in Leipzig.

Linux often seems like a breath of fresh air to Windows users. It’s free. It doesn’t have bloatware issues. You don’t have to pay for it. It has less malware and hacking issues because it’s less profitable and productive for the baddies to concentrate on an operating system with less users.

Did I mention it doesn’t cost anything?

Whatever the reason Linux looks good to you, you have to remember that Linux and Windows are two different animals. Windows is far more professionally polished and noob friendly. (It has to be. You paid for it.) While there are a few supported versions of Windows floating around, most users stick with the one that comes with their machines. On the hand, Linux has so many distributions, it’s hard to keep track sometimes. From the way you install programs to the amount of time you spend in a command prompt screen, it’s a different experience. Whether it’s a good experience or not depends on your preference.

Often you want to automatize something using shell scripting. In a perfect world your script robot works for you without getting tired, without hick-ups, and you can just sit at the front of your desk and sip coffee.

Then we enter the real world: Your network is disconnected. DNS goes downs. Your HTTP hooks and downloads stall. Interprocess communication hangs. Effectively this means that even if your script is running correctly from the point of operating system it won’t finish its work before you finish your cup of coffee.

Physical media is cumbersome.
If you own a lot of DVDs, Blueray discs, VHS, or, gasp!, Discovision (circa 1978), you know how ugly it looks stored in your living room by your entertainment system. Digital media is hot for its portability between devices. Ripping DVDs is a fairly simple process and there are lots of guides around that show how to install and rip movie DVDs using Handbrake. But what about those multi-movie DVDs or DVDs with multiple episodes of a television show? Handbrake can rip those too and the process is fairly simple.